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"When I pet my cat, and then touch her on the nose, I get a little shock. Sometimes, when she walks up to something, her nose sparks and she jumps back and puffs out. I was wondering how I might go about measuring the capacitance of my cat.

...For purrfect results there should be minimal paws between first and second iterations of 2.3.4.

Select cap - say 100 pF.Discharge cap (short)Connect one end of cap to ground - one end of cap to cat..... ( How "to cat" is achieved is left as an exercise for the reader.).... (Cap and cat are now at same purrtential)Disconnect cap from catMeasure Vcaprepeat 2. 3. 4.Compare readings.Repeat with higher and lower caps. Aim is range where V1 / V2 is usefully high - say about 2:1.﻿

Somebody should publish the results, this sounds like great Ig Nobel material.

Capacitance doesn't seem the right measurement though, you want to measure the capacity of a cat to collect static charge. Not the same thing. (One of the StackExchange answers points this out too)

One time when I was a kid, I was jumping on a trampoline with my socks on, and my cat jumped up on the metal frame. I reached out to pat her on the head, and a blue spark an inch wide jumped across to her nose with a loud cracking noise. I had never seen her run so fast, and she wouldn't come near me for days. So I can verify, at least qualitatively, that a cat's capacity for dissipating static charge is enormous when the cat is properly grounded.﻿

#makerfaireatlanta As much as I love lawn chair hover crafts and DIY R2D2 builds, this purely mechanical head that mechanically animates thought processes stole the show. A few cranks turn hundreds of cogs and pullies to animate everything from ocean waves to a crowd of people dancing. ﻿

I must say that I'm very impressed with how you got the basics down. Also, I congratulate you on avoiding the misnomer "bitcoin miner". I think that you could've spend a few sentences on how the network knows that you actually have the BTC to make the payment though, but I guess that's delving into the technical side a bit more than an introductory video has to..﻿

Some old power equipment on display at Duke Energy's museum on Lake Keowee in SC, including a power meter you put quarters in to buy power, some pole climbing leg straps, and hard wood they used for bearings under water. The neatest thing about the hydro plant is that they can reverse it to pump water into an upper reservoir to store energy in off-peak times.﻿

#thebitmovie car stopped by in Atlanta during our Atlanta Bitcoin meetup movie event. They're driving across North America to visit 40 cities in 30 days to make a documentary about the current state of Bitcoin.

The Essence of How Bitcoin Works (Non-technical)A less-technical introduction to the main ideas behind how Bitcoin works, including how money is transferred, who keeps track of it, and how everything is secured. This is the written version of the following video: The goal of this video is to explain the ...﻿